The Age of Appreciation: Reading and Teaching Classic Literature in Australia in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Discusses the concept of 'appreciation' as it was understood and applied in the reading and teaching of classic literature. 'What becomes increasingly apparent and worrying in speaking about a tradition of literary appreciation in the early twentieth century is the artificiality of isolating it within one or another sector of the whole 'institution of literature'. Literary appreciation was being taught, valued and practised in primary and secondary schools, in universities (intra- and extra-mural), and in the general reading culture, in several different parts of the world (including Australia), at more or less the same time. And the boundaries between the various cultural, national and educational sectors were relatively porous: lines of cultural influence, commercial exchange and administrative responsibility passed from one to the other in several different directions.'